{"id":6003,"date":"2020-09-20T14:55:40","date_gmt":"2020-09-20T21:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=6003"},"modified":"2020-09-20T15:00:11","modified_gmt":"2020-09-20T22:00:11","slug":"the-narrative-is-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/?p=6003","title":{"rendered":"The Narrative is King"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Veritas. A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus\u2019 Wife<\/em>, by Ariel Sabar, tells the story of how easily Dr. Karen King of Harvard Divinity School was duped by a forged papyrus. Excerpts from Matti Friedman\u2019s review of Veritas <\/em>in the Jewish Review of Books <\/em>are found below with bolding added for emphasis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the artifact\u2019s clumsy Coptic handwriting and grammar, the world\u2019s most prominent papyrologist, Robert Bagnall of NYU, judged it to be authentic.<\/strong> In fact, the clumsiness only made it seem <\/em>less<\/em> likely to be a forgery, as Bagnall explained to Sabar: \u201cI kept saying, \u2018How could somebody be so sophisticated and so unsophisticated at the same time?\u2019\u201d There are many more details of this kind, and of a more amazing and salacious kind, all of which would have remained in the shadows had Sabar not gone knocking on doors near Venice, Florida, trawling through obscure Coptology blogs (that\u2019s the only kind of Coptology blog), and tracking down the scholars who picked the forgery to pieces<\/strong> using resources they found online.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

King saw herself as a historian<\/em><\/strong> and spoke much about \u201cdata,\u201d but she also wrote, \u201cHistory is not about truth but about power relations,\u201d and thought the historian\u2019s priority should be to drop \u201cthe association between truth and chronology.\u201d All of this made King the perfect mark for the forger peddling the Gospel of Jesus\u2019s Wife.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chapter in which Sabar sketches the intellectual scaffolding of King\u2019s thinking is, to my mind, the most important in the book, because it has lessons beyond a story about one fake artifact. King was taken in, in this telling, partly because she wanted to be\u2014because, like many scholars, journalists, and even scientists, she didn\u2019t seem to believe that truth was a matter of ascertaining facts. \u201cIn other words,\u201d Sabar writes, \u201ca thing was true <\/strong><\/em>not<\/strong><\/em> if it was real; it was true if\u2014in King\u2019s estimation\u2014it was a moral good.\u201d That\u2019s the kind of thinking that has infiltrated the worlds of the media and the academy in the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/em><\/strong> King wanted the respect due to a scientist, and she wanted the freedom of the preacher. She was open to seeing the fragment as true even if it wasn\u2019t quite real. That\u2019s why she was the ideal address for that fateful email in July 2010. The forger\u2019s aim, Sabar writes, was \u201cruthlessly precise.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

King is currently on leave from her post as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. Read the whole review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Veritas. A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus\u2019 Wife<\/em>, by Ariel Sabar, tells the story of how easily Dr. Karen King of Harvard Divinity School was duped by a forged papyrus. Read excerpts from Matti Friedman\u2019s review of Veritas<\/em> in the Jewish Review of Books<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6003"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6014,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6003\/revisions\/6014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crossalone.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}